User blog:CMAN122/New Car Page Layout
After not editing on this wiki for a couple of months and wasting most of my free time with Team Fortress 2, I finally did something again. Some might have been surprised that I didn't update any NFSW car article for a while, which is what I regularly did when MW '12 stuff wasn't done. This is why. Normally, I couldn't care less about our car articles, since there are other things which haven't been done before yet or have to be updated fast. But after regularly visiting the official TF2 wiki, I actually thought that our pages could use more content. Don't get me wrong, with a series as huge as the NFS franchise, this is the only way to keep our car articles short and informative. But if you are looking for more information such as how faster will my car go with x or y upgrade, we can no longer keep this structure. Another thing that bothered me are the infobox stats. Most of them are real-life values that are often completely irrelevant in the NFS series. I'm not talking about engines, drivetrains and all that stuff but values such as acceleration times and top speed. As you might have noticed, the new car page layout no longer contains a specific game appearance section. Instead they were moved to separate pages. I used a tab view layout to make it look like they were never moved. However, for some reason there is a limit for adding tabs, which wouldn't allow pages such as the Ford GT article to have complete tab views. I might change the tab view with simple link lists if the limit cannot be removed. Aside from that, there's hardly anything that could prevent the new layout becoming implemented into this site soon. For any game made before 2003, I have always included a Showcase section. For any game made since 2003, I decided to include performance stats, something that I greatly missed in our NFSW car articles. I think this is a great example of how we can do them. I'd also like to do that with any game that uses bars to show the performance traits of a car. However, I will not do this for now because I haven't figured out how to do them yet. As for visual customisation parts, I'll not include them on the articles. If we want to add body kit galleries to the pages, there's no reason why we shouldn't include pictures of how a car will look like with a roof scoop, custom hood, etc. Before I will continue working on the layout, I have a few questions for you: *Should the infoboxes include performance stats instead of unlocking methods and price tags? If yes, would you prefer performance stats shown in menus, which are very often inaccurate, or measured data obtained from driving. The latter is 100% accurate but could be very time-consuming to do at the same time, though. *How do you feel about adding a unreleased content section in our articles? The TF2 Wiki does that, for instance. But since our partner site, the NFS World Wiki, have gotten themselves into troubles with EA not too long ago, would that still be a good idea? Why not adding something about an unreleased Shift 2 DLC instead of NFSW content? Any wiki has the right to be fully independent of anyone that want to alter its content for their own interests, if I'm not wrong. That's it, for now. If you just happen to have any suggestions or noticed a few errors, feel free to mention them as well. In case of tl;dr: a new car layout will be implemented soon and I'd like to know what else I could improve. Check the two questions above if you want. Category:Blog posts